Legal Commentary

Greetings from glorious Denver. Today was the first day (at least in earnest) of the Law and Society conference.  As I think I mentioned earlier, Alice Ristroph and I used the LSA organizational structure to create a mini crim law conference for about 30 people and 8 panels. The first half of those panels was today and the second half is tomorrow (Friday).  On the punishment theory panel today, we had really interesting papers by John Bronsteen (Happiness and Punishment, with co-authors Masur and Buccafusco), Don Braman (Some Realism about Naturalism, with co-authors Dan Kahan and Dave Hoffman; Don's powerpoint presentation was both effective and hilarious--make sure you invite him to your school for this presentation), Mark D. White (In Consideration of Consequentialist Retributivism), and a less interesting and more inchoate set of remarks by me (Bentham on Stilts? On the Bare Relevance of Subjectivity to Retributivism, co-written with Chad Flanders).  It was definitely one of the best panels I've been on in the last four years, with a really good synergy and engagement by the panelists with each other and with an outstanding set of questions from a great audience at LSA. Every aspect of it was better than I could have hoped for, and I'm grateful to the other panelists and the audience for their thoughtful remarks and participation.